Expert View: Blinded By Portable Science

There's nothing quite like the feel of carrying an ultraportable through the airport or across town.

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There's nothing quite like the feel of carrying an ultraportable through the airport or across town. These tiny computers have come a long way in the past few years. In fact, I'm still amazed by the pure genius of the design and technology that goes into creating an ultraportable.

Different vendors use different materials to build the exterior casing. The preferred metal is magnesium alloy, which can be molded into a thin chassis that's sturdy and tough enough to survive daily bumps and bruises. Other vendors are ­experimenting with different materials. The Sony VAIO SZ series offers the option of a carbon-fiber lid, which is trendy these days, and Lenovo is toying with titanium composites in its ThinkPads. All these materials look good and help keep things cool on the inside, too.

One of the major obstacles facing ultraportable designers, especially when shoehorning robust components into a cramped space, is how to handle excess heat. High-end parts such as powerful graphics subsystems and dual-core CPUs tend to run hot even after only an hour of work. I hate feeling the heat of a system on the palm rests while I'm typing and am always impressed with a system that manages to keep that area cool. Because of this, many designs start off with cooling in mind. The most common solutions involve vents and manipulating airflow, but there's also some interesting technology being used to combat this problem.

It's no secret that Intel Core Duo chips require a lot of juice to run31 watts, to be exact. To prevent a meltdown, Intel has built in a pretty advanced thermal management system, called Intel Advanced Thermal Manager. Digital temperature sensors on each core monitor the heat of the processor and will lower the voltage and frequency of both cores if ­either sensor detects that the system is running too hot. Impressive stuff. I only wish that 3D giants ATI and nVidia would follow suit and produce graphics solutions better at handling heat.

Intel's forthcoming 64-bit "Merom" processor for mobile computers is based on Intel's Core micro-architecture. The new chip is designed to be even more power-efficient than the current Intel Core Duos. This means we'll see even more power, longer battery life, and less heat in laptops later this year.

Cisco Cheng is the Lead Analyst of the laptop team at PCMag.com. He’s a one-man wrecking crew who tests and writes about anything considered a laptop (yes, even netbooks). He’s been with PC Mag for over 10 years and gets occasional headaches from all the technical knowledge he has absorbed during that time. He’d still be snowboarding and playing basketball had he not been through multiple knee surgeries (well, two). Now he spends his time with Google Reader, the iPhone 3G, and his now 3-year...
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